Expert training advice to help you reach your fitness goals. Discover workout routines, exercise techniques, and training programs designed to improve your strength, build muscle, and enhance athletic performance.
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Here's a finding that should change how you plan your next training cycle: a 2017 meta-analysis of 18 studies in Sports Medicine found that periodized resistance training produced larger 1RM strength ...
Training to failure means doing reps until you can't complete another one with good form. It's one of the most argued-about variables in lifting, and the evidence has moved a lot since most of the pag...
Most lifters treat rest as dead time: scroll the phone, start the next set when you feel like it. But how long you rest between sets changes how many quality reps you get on the next set, and those re...
Lengthened partials are reps you cut short on purpose, working only the stretched half of an exercise: the bottom of a curl, the deep part of a leg extension, the low end of a calf raise. The idea spr...
Here's something that should stop you mid-set: skeletal muscle can produce more relative force during eccentric actions (Suchomel et al., 2019) than during concentric ones, so you can handle more load...
Here's something that should change how you think about programming: your strength is not the same every day, even when you follow the same protocol. Yet most people follow a spreadsheet that tells th...
Here's a number that should stop you mid-set: research on resistance training progression suggests that up to 47% of intermediate lifters experience a hypertrophy plateau within their first 18 months ...
Here's a stat that surprises most lifters: research from the NSCA suggests that up to 40% of intermediate lifters plateau on their main compound lifts not because they're undertraining, but because th...
Here's a stat that should change how you program: research on joint angle specific strength suggests that trained lifters can be up to 40% weaker at their sticking point than at their strongest joint ...
Why Your Strength Has Stalled (And What Elite Lifters Know That You Don't) Here is a sobering statistic: research published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that intermediat...
Myo-reps and drop sets build about as much muscle as regular straight sets when you match effort, and both get you there in less time. The difference is practical: drop sets fit exercises where you ca...
A rest-pause set is one set split into mini-sets: you take a weight close to failure, rack it, rest 10 to 30 seconds, then do more reps with the same weight, usually two or three times. Rest-pause tra...